"The Psychic Life of the Poor": A City Unseen in Mumbai, London, and New York

《穷人的精神生活：一个在孟买、伦敦和纽约看不见的城市》将审视新自由主义社会对城市贫困、种族和移民的不充分参与，正如在全球城市的特定背景下所看到的那样。拟议的工作审查了与每个城市的心理健康文化（精神分析和精神病学）有关的贫穷的文学和文化表现，以及这种文化如何反映在公众和私人对穷人心理生活的态度中。纵观医学史、城市研究、人类学和人文地理学的同源领域，这个文学批判项目是丰富的跨学科的，具有特殊的政策影响。它将涉及与学术和非学术伙伴的广泛合作和知识共享。我将与各国临床心理学和精神病学领域的杰出人物合作。该项目还需要广泛参与当地和全球的倡议，以解决城市化、贫困和精神疾病等问题。这些章节将借鉴一系列文学和文化作品来探索大都市中心被遗弃的穷人的表现：小说，叙事非小说，电影，图像档案。在这个过程中，他们将引入新的文学形式（如人道主义或生态批评小说），挑战人们对文学不世俗和深奥的普遍看法。文学批评在一个围绕城市贫民心理健康护理的现实问题展开的项目中有三方面的作用。首先，文学和精神分析一样，可以在新自由主义政府和自由市场话语的决定之外，对情感生活进行彻底的重新思考。其次，审视人道主义话语对人文教育和创意艺术的新影响是及时的。例如，在环境卫生和社会正义问题上，二十世纪末和二十一世纪初的作家和活动家提出了针对脆弱生命和住所的人道主义批评。最后，小说和叙事非小说等文学形式不仅使人权文化变得清晰可辨，这种文化现在支持许多人道主义工作，而且还积极地将其职权范围扩大到传统上在人权话语中被忽视的次等社区。这个项目的一个独特和原创性的特点是，它突出了围绕城市贫困的文化想象与（国家）关于穷人心理健康需求的政策之间相互影响的关系。在精神分析的历史方法中，一个被截断的（但仍有影响的）社会主义阶段与文学和文化干预就社会不平等和普遍正义问题进行了对话。我特别关注国际框架下的弗洛伊德精神分析，以及精神分析作为一种开创性的非药物干预传播的多种形式：心理治疗、咨询、群体心理学、基于创伤的认知行为治疗。西格蒙德·弗洛伊德（Sigmund Freud）在20世纪二三十年代关于精神分析的社会良知的开创性工作，为维也纳和其他欧洲城市的“免费诊所”奠定了基础，为这一事业提供了历史框架。弗洛伊德在这个时代的临床实践接受了一战后维也纳的社会民主主义意识形态，他在1918年至1938年间的宣言帮助建立了从萨格勒布到伦敦的十几个合作精神健康诊所。这个项目追溯了“免费诊所”现象的来生，从孟买、加尔各答、德里、班加罗尔、伦敦和纽约的一些免费或低收费心理治疗诊所的运作中可以看到。该项目的成果包括：专著；散文集：散文集；两个研究生工作坊；国际会议；由TORCH维护的项目网页；这是全球知识项目“对话”上的一篇文章。

"The Psychic Life of the Poor: A City Unseen in Mumbai, London, and New York," will examine neoliberal society's inadequate engagements with urban poverty, race, and migrancy, as seen in the specific context of global cities. The proposed work examines literary and cultural representations of poverty in relation to each city's mental health culture (psychoanalytic and psychiatric), and how that culture is reflected in public and private attitudes towards the psychic life of the poor. Looking across to cognate fields in the history of medicine, urban studies, anthropology, and human geography, this literary critical project is richly interdisciplinary and has exceptional policy reach. It will involve extensive collaborations and knowledge-sharing with academic and non-academic partners. I will work with prominent figures in clinical psychology and psychiatry in each country. The project will also entail extensive engagement with local and global initiatives working in the interface of urbanism, poverty, and mental illness. The chapters will draw on a range of literary and cultural productions to explore representations of the outcast poor of metropolitan centres: fiction, narrative non-fiction, cinema, image archives. They will introduce, in the process, novel forms of literature (such as the humanitarian or ecocritical novel) that defy the common perception of literature as unworldly and esoteric. The function of literary criticism in a project that revolves around the ground reality of mental health care for the urban poor is three-fold. First, literature, like psychoanalysis, can allow a radical rethinking of affective life outside the determinations of neoliberal governments and free market discourse. Secondly, it is timely to examine the renewed influence of the discourse of humanitarianism on humanities education and the creative arts. Problems of environmental health and social justice have, for instance, seen writer-activists in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries develop humanitarian critiques addressing vulnerable lives and habitations. Finally, literary forms such as the novel and narrative non-fiction not only make legible the culture of human rights that supports much humanitarian work now but also actively extend its remit to subaltern communities traditionally overlooked in human rights discourse. A unique and original feature of this project is that it highlights the mutually influential relationship between the cultural imaginary around urban poverty and (state) policy on the mental health needs of the poor. A truncated (but influential nevertheless) socialist phase in the historical method of psychoanalysis is brought into dialogue with literary and cultural interventions on matters of social inequality and universal justice. I focus particularly on Freudian psychoanalysis in an international frame and the multiple forms in which psychoanalysis, as a pioneering non-pharmaceutical intervention, is transmitted: psychotherapy, counselling, group psychology, trauma-based cognitive behavioural therapy. Sigmund Freud's pathbreaking work of the 1920s and 30s on the social conscience of psychoanalysis, leading to the foundation of "free clinics" in Vienna and other European cities, provides the historical framework for this undertaking. Freud's clinical practice in this era embraced the social-democratic ideology of post WW1 Vienna and his pronouncements between 1918 and 1938 helped create a dozen cooperative mental health clinics from Zaghreb to London. This project traces the afterlife of the "free clinic" phenomenon, as seen in the operations of a number of free or low-fee psychotherapy clinics in Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Bangalore, London, and New York.The outcomes of this project include: a monograph; a volume of essays; two graduate workshops; an international conference; a project webpage maintained by TORCH; an article in "The Conversation," a global knowledge project.